My quite random afternoon spent making Trapped in a Box has resulted in me spending quite a lot of time thinking about the game. I want to add a branching narrative to it – the overall story will remain the same, but as you spend time dodging slime, I want to enable the player to explore different aspects of the story. I want the core gameplay to remain the same, trying to read while dodging slime. The question is: how best to do this.

My first thought was too keep it completely hidden from the player – basing it upon the length of time they spent on either side of the platform ( or amount of time they have been in the air or close calls or some other metric … ), the branches in the story would be triggered by this metric. Also, after adding time dilation I debated rewarding the player for not using it by giving them positive aspects of the story. Alas, the story that I have so far for the box doesn’t really have good and bad parts, so feel this would be pointless – I’m also trying to avoid getting to Lovecraft about it – but not sure I can 🙂

So I put together three mock-ups of the game, which would allow the player to choose a branch based upon a key phrase. The first two are simply putting the decision above the platform, meaning the player has to jump to activate it. The third way is to use the Q and E keys to decide.

Option 1 : fairly simple, just the words appearing

Option 2 : very similar to option 1, but with boxes around the words

Option 3 : Using the Q and E keys to decide

Option 4 : Keep the choices the player makes hidden

I think the primary goal with the multiple branch technique is so that the game play isn’t so repetitive – I’m not very good at it and tend to die a lot 🙂 It would be interesting to explore other parts of the story by picking a different way to go through it every time I die. Also remembering the paths I have taken already to view bits of the story adds to the game itself. So anyway, feel free to aid me with my quest or add any suggestions your have 🙂